Castles and Chateaux of Old Burgundy

by M. F. Mansfield

Cuiseaux’ monumental remains are even more scant, and the town itself hardly resembles a town of Burgundy. It is more like a place in Switzerland or the Jura; indeed, to the latter region it once belonged, and only came to be Burgundian when the princes of the house, through some petty quarrel, took it for their own by force, as was the way in those gallant, profligate days.

Cuiseaux does possess, however, a ruined aspect of wall and rampart which suggests that it must have been one of the most admirably defended places of the neighbourhood, judging from an old fifteenth century plan preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Then it was proud of its ramparts which possessed thirty-six protecting towers. To-day but two of these sentinels remain, and it were vainglorious to claim too much for them, particularly since the modern plan of the town makes it look as conventionally dull and uninteresting as an Arab ghourbi in the Atlas, or an adobe village in Arizona.

At Pont-de-Vaux, between Bourg and Louhans, one comes to a trim little town, an outgrowth of the ancient village of Vaux, belonging at one time to the Sires de Baugé, and later to the Duc de Savoie, Charles III, who made it a Comté in 1623. It afterwards grew to the dignity of a Duché, so made by Louis XIII. Much is preserved to-day of the ancient manner of building, and, all in all, it is quite as satisfactory an example of a mediæval town as has been left untouched by the mature hand of progress of these late days.

Nantua is known to the traveller in modern France only as another of those lakeside resorts which are such delightful places of sojourn for those who would avoid for a time the strife of great cities. It is a gem of a town, set in a diadem of beauty which surrounds the tiny lake of the same name, but it has no historic monuments, if we except the tomb of Charles le Chauve in the church. This at least entitles it to a passing comment here, this and the memory of a happy afternoon we passed by the crystal waters of this brilliant lake.

Midway between Bourg and Mâcon is Pont-de-Veyle. This old feudal town was once the particular possession of a brilliant line of seigneurs of France and Savoy, the last, under François I, being the Comte de Furstemburg, who acquired it as a payment for certain levies of Germans that he had furnished the French monarch.

The ancient manor of the Furstemburgs still exists, but it is hardly of a proportion or architectural merit to have distinction. Here, too, are the reconstructed remains of the eighteenth century of a family chateau of the Maréchal de Lesdiguières, whose fortunes were more intimately bound up with Gap and Vizille than with this less accessible property. Like Vizille it has been “put into condition” in recent years, and, while lacking the mossy, romantic air of mediævalism, fulfils most of the demands of the worshipper at historic shrines.

There is still standing here an old city gate dating from the thirteenth century, and this in turn is surmounted by a belfry of the sixteenth. The ensemble suggests that it was once a part of a more noble fortress-chateau. The Maison des Savoyards was probably a princely rest-house when the nobles of its era passed this way. Beyond its name, and the elaborate decorations of its façade, there is nothing else to support the conjecture. Its history, whatever it may have been, is lost in the confusion with which many ancient records are covered to-day.

Turning southwest on the highroad, from Burgundy into Savoy through the heart of Dombes, one soon reaches Châtillon-les-Dombes. As its name indicates, it is a descendant of the town which grew up around an ancient seigneurial residence here of the fourteenth century. Chiefly this is memory only, for the fragmentary débris takes on no distinction to-day beyond that of any other indiscriminate pile of stones and mortar.

Montluel, near-by, is in much the same category. It is famous only for the fact that it was here that Amé VII was presented the Duché de Savoie by Sigismond in 1496, and that in troublous, mediæval days it was the safe haven for many political refugees from Geneva and Florence. Montluel, in Latin Mons Lupelli, was the capital of the fief of Valbonne. The remains existing to-day, and locally called “le chateau,” are those of an edifice which had an existence and a career of sorts in the eleventh century, but which since that date has no recorded history.

To Pont d’Ain and Belley is still on the direct road to Savoy. On the great “route internationale” from Paris to Turin sits the ancient chateau of Pont d’Ain, which owes its name to the old bridge which once spanned the Ain at this point.